1. Build a career that enables you to work from
home.
The best way to get control of your life is working from home, because once you’re
home, then things start to shift in favor of you instead of your
company.

But there are relatively few types of jobs that translate to a
career from home. Survey the types of careers that are typical of
at‑home workers and set yourself up for one of them.

2. Women, freeze your
embryos.
I’m actually a fan of approaching your biological clock
head-on instead of procrastinating by freezing your
eggs. That seems like you’re just putting off the inevitable
realities of having a family. Nothing changes when the eggs are
frozen except that you build a bigger career that you must scale
back when you do have kids.

But sometimes really bad things happen to us, like your whole
family burns up in a fire and you have to go to six years of
therapy, and you can’t start dating until you’re 31. So for cases
like this, or less extreme, it’s good to just have your embryos
saved.

Why doesn’t everybody just save embryos? It’s kind of like cord blood. It’s what rich people do to avoid
calamitous medical situations.

What you didn’t know is that you can kind of buy yourself some
time if you’ve been lifting weights really hard-core the whole
time in your 20s. Muscle just sort of lingers on so you can do
mostly lame workouts in your 30s if you lifted weights in your
20s. This plan allows you a lot more flexibility.
It allows you to have years when you don’t work out because
you’re trying to rearrange your life, and it makes all
transitions easier to know that your body isn’t falling apart
when you’re doing them.

The problem is that a fascinating study from
Harvard reveals that the only indicator of who will
be happy and who won’t later in life is who remains close to
their siblings. So you might think that what’s really going to
make you happy is to be hot enough to get into exclusive clubs,
but that doesn’t last. Your siblings are what lasts. So go visit
them when you have time off.

5. Don’t stress about
relocation.
It’s overwhelming to think you’re 22 and you can live anywhere. Unfortunately, it’s not
actually true. It’s true that you can live anywhere,
but it’s not true that you’re going to want to live
just anywhere.

After you have kids you’re going to want to live where your
family is because this is what happens: Nobody really cares about your kids. In fact,
nobody even likes other people’s kids. They like their own kids.
The exception to this is family. Family loves other family.

We love our nieces and nephews and grandkids similarly to our own
kids, so you’re going to want to be near family. You’re
going to relocate to family when you realize none of your friends
actually care about your kids. You’ll know because they’re not
inviting you for holidays anymore — they’re going to see family
on holidays because they want someone to dote on their kids.